As a business owner, it is often hard to justify the investment of time and money into a new software. Here are a set of criteria which any software must meet in order to be adopted and be useful to their customers.

All designers use lines to convey mood, either consciously or otherwise. Here’s a guide which specifies the different lines with some examples of how they are used in movie posters, designs and artwork. Mood Lines: Setting the Tone of Your Design

FEB 07, 2015

In a previous life, my manager sagaciously instructed me, “debug only code, not the comments”. Amazing, it has served me in life outside software too. Here is a nice compilation of proverbs filtering back from the digital world into the real one. Are these 11 proverbs for the digital age?

JAN 01, 2015

If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
— Seng-Ts’an, Zen poet.

DEC 30, 2014

Find a bug in a program, and fix it, and
the program will work today. Show the
program how to find and fix a bug, and the
program will work forever. — Oliver Selfridge.

Communicating a message to far out future is a problem that is still unsolved. It has been getting some attention because of the need to safely dispose nuclear waste which has a very long life. But, the problem is bigger than that.

Touch screens, however cool they may look now, aren’t the best interface we can get. They force us to use at most couple of fingers and motions, out of the myriad ones our hands are capable of, and which we use effortlessly while interecting with physical things. Technology has a lot to catch up to. Here’s a beautiful rant: The Future of Interaction Design by Bret Victor.

Recently one of the developers who used to work at 8Rays asked me for some advice about his career plan. We had several email exchanges and I ended up giving him lots of advice. May be some of them are generic enough to be useful to a wider audience. So, here it is.

Artificial Intelligence or AI has never really left the news but it has always been something in the future. Tantalizing with its possibilities but not here yet. However, it is again being talked about, this time in more practical terms. Here’s an overview.

We all know computers are number crunching machines. But, how do they handle letters and words? How does a computer store and display your email and help you write a document? Learn about how the computer’s ability to handle numbers translate into its ability to process text by a sly trick.